Hello everyone!

In today’s devlog, we’d like to share some details about the character selection system.
As some of you may not know, Verren isn’t the main character of our game. He only comes under your control in the Prologue. In the main game, however, he is an employer and a mentor figure to your character.



We plan to introduce an option to create your own mercenary, but at the moment the game lacks systems necessary for implementing a fully working character generator. Instead, we added an option to choose from four preset characters. Each of them has their own appearance, portrait, starting inventory, starting attributes, some special dialogue options and also a unique perk, unavailable to other characters.

An important thing about preset characters is that they have affinities, governing which skills are initially unlocked. For instance, Jorgrim is good with melee weapons and can start leveling swords, axes and maces from the get go. But to learn starting skills of the pyromancy and geomancy trees, he’ll have to find a corresponding treatise first.

We intend to expand this system at the same time as working on the character generator. According to our plans, some heroes will have access to unique content, which can’t be discovered when playing as other characters. For now this type of content is represented with unique starting equipment. For example, Arna starts the game with a family cuirass and sword, which can’t be obtained in any other way. We also plan to expand the character selection as we add more skill trees.

Some may ask: but what about classes? How do they fit into this system? Yes, at first we did consider adding classes, but as the development went on, it became quite clear that it would be completely redundant. Class abilities came in conflict with our vision for character development, and they weren’t really working with all possible archetypes, forcing you to play in a very specific manner. We wanted to avoid that. Class abilities also turned out to be fairly generic and boring when compared to common skill trees. As a result it was decided to transfer the best ideas into the existing skill trees and get rid of the rest.

Now let us present you with the backstories and affinities for each character:




Affinity: Axes, Swords, Maces, Shields
Unique trait: Berserker Frenzy (increased Weapon Damage and Crit Efficiency for 10 turns after every kill)

Bio:

Not so long ago people of Aldor would shake in their boots the moment someone mentioned Tyr the One-eyed, a legendary leader of Fjall brigands. Tyr's band was infamous for their audacious raids on the northern border - even well armed troops of the local lords suffered defeat after defeat from these ferocious dwarfs. Jorgrim was one of them, the best warrior in the band, he hadn't lost a single battle in his life.

Yet as time went by, the One-eyed's brutality towards captured settlements became too unsettling even for his own underlings. Jorgrim was the one who despised unnecessary cruelty the most: he always held a belief that violence against the weak and defenseless is unworthy of a true warrior.

It's unknown when Tyr crossed the final line, but eventually Jorgrim's patience ran short and the brigand leader's scalp found its place in the dwarf's long list of trophies. Left without guidance, the band fell apart: some dwarfs returned to Fjall, while others, including Jorgrim, decided to go south and try their luck as mercenaries.




Affinity: Swords, Maces, Shields, Greatswords
Unique trait: Vow of the Feat (every enemy within your vision range decreases Cooldowns Duration and Abilities Energy Cost)

Bio:

Few noble houses of Aldor can boast history as impressive as of the House of der Vyrne. By law, the title of a knight can only be passed down to a man, so it's not hard to imagine the chagrin of Arna's father, when after years of fruitless attempts his long awaited heir turned out to be a girl.

To save his house, Arna's father decided to invoke an ancient custom of the northern foothills: Arna was to be raised as a boy. Her entire childhood and youth were dedicated to rigorous training and serving as a page to one of the noble families. When she reached adulthood, Arna was knighted. Over multiple tournaments, she managed to earn herself a reputation as a skilled warrior.

Unfortunately Arna never had a knack for the most important skill to an aldorian noble - scheming. Soon after her father's death, Arna lost her fief, her title and her inheritance - the House of der Vyrne ceased to exist. Shaken by these events, Arna gave an oath to redeem herself by a heroic deed and embarked on an endless journey into the lands of Aldor.




Affinity: Ranged Combat, Axes, Maces, Daggers
Unique trait: Sharp Eye (every tile between you and your enemy increases Crit Chance)
Bio:

Dirwin spent most of his life in loyal service to the late king, relentlessly patrolling the hunting grounds of his Majesty. He had great aim, knew the forest as the back of his hand and very few poachers, orcs and monsters survived their encounter with the royal ranger. Over his years of service, Dirwin eradicated countless dangers lurking in the woods, making one notch after another on his bow.

After King Etbert's death, the Royal Rangers disobeyed the Council's orders and refused to participate in the fratricidal war. As a punishment, the unit was disbanded, so Dirwin took his weapons and headed back into the woods.

During the war he continued to do what he always did: fulfill contracts and bounties, hunt dangerous monsters and help peasants. Common folks rightfully consider him their stalwart protector.




Affinity: Staves, Daggers, Geomancy, Pyromancy
Unique trait: Arcane Lore (each learned spell increases Magic Power)
Bio:

Since ancient times there is a strong belief in Aldor, that women and magic don't go well together and can only bode ill. Lectors of the Academy fully shared this prejudice, rarely eager to accept women for magic training. However, Jonna's talent for magic was so great, that they decided to make an exception.

After completing her training with flying colors, Jonna became a court sorceress to one of the aldorian nobles. Unfortunately her lord had a rather foul temper, something Jonna wouldn't put up with. One morning servants discovered their master's body burned to a crisp. The sorceress' sudden escape didn't leave much room for interpretation.

If it wasn't for the war breaking out, Jonna would have likely been caught and burned at the stake, but in the chaos of the Strife she managed to elude the chase by joining a mercenary band.

------------

Just Jonna picking some field herbs.
That’s all for now. Until next time!

Also you can follow us on:

• Our Steam Creator page
  
• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook

Hello!

Work on 0.18 is coming to an end and the new version will be uploaded tomorrow. It's a fairly comprehensive update that adds the foundation of several new features as well as fixes for a handful big and/or annoying bugs. I've received quite a bit of feedback as to QoL changes that people would like to see in the game as well as some needed fixes. I've tried to get as many as possible into 0.18 already, but have not managed to get all of them in. So moving forward I will post a couple of smaller updates on a week to week basis, so that these fixes get implemented as soon as possible.

Among the fixes that will be going in starting next week:
- Click and drag for building placement.
- Sound effects volume adjustments as well as a few minor fixes (where there are specific sounds missing for example).
- Untranslated words in French, Spanish, German and Russian localisation.
- Additional controls options and a few control tweaks.
- Descriptions of modifiers/crates.
- An intermediate tutorial.

In these more frequent updates I will also be expanding the advisor and citizen rep systems that will be added in with tomorrow's update. These systems will improve the flow of information to the player about issues to adress in the city. The additions made over the upcoming few weeks will mainly be aimed at adding more information that is displayed to the player.

I estimate the above mentioned improvements will be added in over the coming 3 weeks, after which I will return to the intended update schedule of updates every other week with focus especially on expanding the late game and adding a handful of new buildings and resources.

/ Nick

Hello everyone!

In today’s devlog, we’d like to share some details about the character selection system.
As some of you may not know, Verren isn’t the main character of our game. He only comes under your control in the Prologue. In the main game, however, he is an employer and a mentor figure to your character.



We plan to introduce an option to create your own mercenary, but at the moment the game lacks systems necessary for implementing a fully working character generator. Instead, we added an option to choose from four preset characters. Each of them has their own appearance, portrait, starting inventory, starting attributes, some special dialogue options and also a unique perk, unavailable to other characters.

An important thing about preset characters is that they have affinities, governing which skills are initially unlocked. For instance, Jorgrim is good with melee weapons and can start leveling swords, axes and maces from the get go. But to learn starting skills of the pyromancy and geomancy trees, he’ll have to find a corresponding treatise first.

We intend to expand this system at the same time as working on the character generator. According to our plans, some heroes will have access to unique content, which can’t be discovered when playing as other characters. For now this type of content is represented with unique starting equipment. For example, Arna starts the game with a family cuirass and sword, which can’t be obtained in any other way. We also plan to expand the character selection as we add more skill trees.

Some may ask: but what about classes? How do they fit into this system? Yes, at first we did consider adding classes, but as the development went on, it became quite clear that it would be completely redundant. Class abilities came in conflict with our vision for character development, and they weren’t really working with all possible archetypes, forcing you to play in a very specific manner. We wanted to avoid that. Class abilities also turned out to be fairly generic and boring when compared to common skill trees. As a result it was decided to transfer the best ideas into the existing skill trees and get rid of the rest.

Now let us present you with the backstories and affinities for each character:



Affinity: Axes, Swords, Maces, Shields
Unique trait: Berserker Frenzy (increased Weapon Damage and Crit Efficiency for 10 turns after every kill)

Bio:

Not so long ago people of Aldor would shake in their boots the moment someone mentioned Tyr the One-eyed, a legendary leader of Fjall brigands. Tyr's band was infamous for their audacious raids on the northern border - even well armed troops of the local lords suffered defeat after defeat from these ferocious dwarfs. Jorgrim was one of them, the best warrior in the band, he hadn't lost a single battle in his life.

Yet as time went by, the One-eyed's brutality towards captured settlements became too unsettling even for his own underlings. Jorgrim was the one who despised unnecessary cruelty the most: he always held a belief that violence against the weak and defenseless is unworthy of a true warrior.

It's unknown when Tyr crossed the final line, but eventually Jorgrim's patience ran short and the brigand leader's scalp found its place in the dwarf's long list of trophies. Left without guidance, the band fell apart: some dwarfs returned to Fjall, while others, including Jorgrim, decided to go south and try their luck as mercenaries.



Affinity: Swords, Maces, Shields, Greatswords
Unique trait: Vow of the Feat (every enemy within your vision range decreases Cooldowns Duration and Abilities Energy Cost)

Bio:

Few noble houses of Aldor can boast history as impressive as of the House of der Vyrne. By law, the title of a knight can only be passed down to a man, so it's not hard to imagine the chagrin of Arna's father, when after years of fruitless attempts his long awaited heir turned out to be a girl.

To save his house, Arna's father decided to invoke an ancient custom of the northern foothills: Arna was to be raised as a boy. Her entire childhood and youth were dedicated to rigorous training and serving as a page to one of the noble families. When she reached adulthood, Arna was knighted. Over multiple tournaments, she managed to earn herself a reputation as a skilled warrior.

Unfortunately Arna never had a knack for the most important skill to an aldorian noble - scheming. Soon after her father's death, Arna lost her fief, her title and her inheritance - the House of der Vyrne ceased to exist. Shaken by these events, Arna gave an oath to redeem herself by a heroic deed and embarked on an endless journey into the lands of Aldor.



Affinity: Ranged Combat, Axes, Maces, Daggers
Unique trait: Sharp Eye (every tile between you and your enemy increases Crit Chance)
Bio:

Dirwin spent most of his life in loyal service to the late king, relentlessly patrolling the hunting grounds of his Majesty. He had great aim, knew the forest as the back of his hand and very few poachers, orcs and monsters survived their encounter with the royal ranger. Over his years of service, Dirwin eradicated countless dangers lurking in the woods, making one notch after another on his bow.

After King Etbert's death, the Royal Rangers disobeyed the Council's orders and refused to participate in the fratricidal war. As a punishment, the unit was disbanded, so Dirwin took his weapons and headed back into the woods.

During the war he continued to do what he always did: fulfill contracts and bounties, hunt dangerous monsters and help peasants. Common folks rightfully consider him their stalwart protector.



Affinity: Staves, Daggers, Geomancy, Pyromancy
Unique trait: Arcane Lore (each learned spell increases Magic Power)
Bio:

Since ancient times there is a strong belief in Aldor, that women and magic don't go well together and can only bode ill. Lectors of the Academy fully shared this prejudice, rarely eager to accept women for magic training. However, Jonna's talent for magic was so great, that they decided to make an exception.

After completing her training with flying colors, Jonna became a court sorceress to one of the aldorian nobles. Unfortunately her lord had a rather foul temper, something Jonna wouldn't put up with. One morning servants discovered their master's body burned to a crisp. The sorceress' sudden escape didn't leave much room for interpretation.

If it wasn't for the war breaking out, Jonna would have likely been caught and burned at the stake, but in the chaos of the Strife she managed to elude the chase by joining a mercenary band.

------------

Just Jonna picking some field herbs.
That’s all for now. Until next time!

Also you can follow us on:

• Our Steam Creator page
  
• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook

Your game should now be updated to the newest version! See the blog post for more release notes:
https://the-last-sovereign.blogspot.com/2020/01/tls-0482-public-release.html

I hope everyone enjoys this return to Eustrin! I think the one thing I want to mention is that in the middle of this update, there's an optional fight that's proved fairly challenging. Please feel free to leave it for later if you're not enjoying it.

As mentioned in the game, the next update will be the first open world segment in Chapter 5, and it will be a lot of work. It's my next priority, however, and should come out before I spend time on any of my other projects.

Community translation: Deutsch - Français

Hello everyone!

You’ve been asking for some news about crafting for some time now, today we’re happy to share with you what is crafting in Wolcen, and how this works.

But first, we would like to inform you that the Online servers for Wolcen will be shut down on January 29 to prepare for the release version.
Starting January 29, it will only be possible to play Wolcen Offline until the release of the game on February 13.

Now let’s talk about the main topic!



Let’s have a word about gems since they’re going to be part of the crafting process.

Gems will be a bit different at the release and offer various options.
Their affixes values will not be based on a random roll but will be fixed and only determined by the gem’s type and quality. This allows gems to be stackable items.

Here is an example of what it will be like. As usual, keep in mind that the values shown on these items are not final.



As you noticed, there will now be three types of Offensive, Defensive, and Support bonuses. The matching sockets to these bonuses will be determined by a random roll on your armor.



This armor allows you to have two Defensive (I) and one Defensive (II) sockets which corresponds on the shown gem to +6 Health Regeneration and +6% Force Shield Regeneration Rate.

The chances to roll a socket (I), (II) or (III) are the same, there is no rarity rank between these.

Socketting these gems will offer you on this armor an additional bonus of +12 Health Regeneration and +6% Force Shield Regeneration Rate.





The craft will be based on item affixes modifications and consuming socketed gems to force or protect specific affixes. For that, you will have several reagents available in-game as loots or endgame rewards, and you will need to use gems if you want to have control over the outcome of your craft.

Here are the various reagents that will be available:






These reagents all have special effects and you don’t need to have a gem on your item to use them at all. They also exist with a Greater form allowing you to use them on legendary items, but never on Uniques.



Also, to allow you better control over your crafting and the bonuses that you wish to add or protect on your items, you will have the possibility to reroll your sockets at the Jeweller, Zanafer Stark.

Take note that the Item level will define the minimum and maximum tier of modifiers applicable to the item.
The average gem level will define the maximum tier of modifier forced or protected on the item.



Here is a small example of what I can do with the item and gems I’ve used, adding an Erieban’s Tear. Erieban’s tear adds a random magic effect when used on an item. It consumes all socketed gems to guarantee a new magic effect whose power depends on the gem's level and the type of gem socketed.
In case of different gem types socketed, the craft will be affected randomly by one of these gems.

Let's assume I'm lucky, so the result would be the following:



On this item, I managed to obtain +6 Health Regeneration as an additional bonus, and I still have sockets to improve that bonus if I want to.
There is a limit to the number of Prefixes and Suffixes I can have on an item, but as long as there is room for it and reagents to work with, you can have some very interesting results to maximize your gear efficiency.



In addition to the traditional gems, you will also be able to obtain special gems allowing you to add very powerful modifiers to your armor and weapons through crafting, such as the ability to use a skill that you should not be able to use otherwise, add an ailment stack, additional pierce, basically the effects that you can already have in the current Sarisel challenge, and more that will be added at the release.

We hope that you appreciated this preview on crafting. Don’t hesitate to give us your feedback!

As always, thank you for your support :)

Useful links :
Wolcen's Official Website
Wolcen's Beta Roadmap
Wolcen's Bug tracker
Wolcen's Community Suggestions votes

Social media
Wolcen's Official Discord server
Wolcen's Twitter page
Wolcen's Official Facebook Page
Wolcen's Reddit
Wolcen's Instagram Page

Community websites:
German Fan Site: http://www.wolcen-game.de/

We have been very busy with development during the holidays and got a huge progress to report! Starting with storyline, world, RPG elements(NPCs, Quests, Shops, Items), through animations, enemies, bosses and more!

It's impossible to show it all with screens, so we are planning a gameplay teaser very soon! However, here is a few images showing some new locations in the game.

Hello! We are releasing another stability patch for DemonCrawl today.

We are in the beginning phase of the next major DemonCrawl update; stay tuned for more details when we publish the results of our poll (open for another week or two, don't forget to place your votes!) and discuss what it means for the game's development. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to participate - it's been a huge help for us!

Full patch notes are below.

• The help menu now records additional events, such as damage taken and coins spent
  
• Collecting an artifact or emblem will now show a message indicating how many you have

• Fixed crash related to a slow response from the leaderboards
  
• Fixed crash when certain kinds of loot tried to spawn in the Metagate
  
• Fixed crash that occurred when Justice Juice removed an omen with a status effect
  
• Fixed crash when popping Wishpool from a bubble
  
• Fixed incorrect divine count in the codex
  
• Fixed Totem and Blighted Totem using outdated stage power code
  
• Fixed Divine Pickaxe price
  
• Fake Moustache messages will not show up so frequently anymore
  
• Boss movement animation now scales properly with board zoom
  
• Speculative fix for Golden Chestplate crash

Build 221:

-Fix possible crash loading corrupted trash compactors
-Draws configure alert icon on unconfigured stairs when loading save
-Fix some tool tips on tool icons above tools

It's time again for our weekly development stream! Join us as we toil away at new content. ːdeeperwrenchː

Watch and follow Deli Interactive on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/deliinteractive

Welcome to our first Terminal Protocol DevLog. Here you can get some insight information about our development, plans and latest events!

1. Development summary

First, we wanted to share with you some information about the latest changes we have made to the game since our last hearing!

In the latest months, we have been busy addressing all the feedback and suggestion received on Poznań Game Arena 2019 Expo and later on our Discord. We have reworked massive and important parts of our game in fields such as graphics, readability or user experience.

- Optimization - we have worked really hard on game graphics systems to achieve better performance and stability on low-end PCs. Right now we almost doubled FPS achieved on the reference PCs! We also added graphical presets to menu options so performance could be further increased by lowering game settings.



- Graphical Effects - we added some additional graphical effects such as moving environment decorations, shots decals, shields effects or slow-mo shots. Right now gameplay should be a lot more spectacular!



- Readability - we have also made some noticeable changes to the readability of the game. Enemies have been recoloured to distinguish them from the board, player viruses received a new movement preview and shields available for activation are now highlighted on the board.



We have uploaded these changes to a special steam branch to close group of beta testers, sometime later we plan to upload these changes to a public testing version of the game. If you want to try it out for yourself - join our Discord - https://discord.gg/5zmxqC3

We also aim to showcase this latest public build on Digital Dragons 2020 expo. Stay tuned on more information about that later!

2. Plans

Right now we are focusing on refactoring game menus, tooltips and localisation. After that, we plan to implement multiple UX tweaks and reworked tutorial.

We have also started work on our Steam teaser trailer which will be available on our Steam page in February! Stayed tuned for more information!

3. News

Lately, we have a lecture on Wrocław GameDev Meeting regarding Terminal Protocol production process. Our presentation covered topics such as features prototyping, discussion moderations and milestones refactoring/finalisation.

We would like to thank for an invitation and a great discussion after the lecture. We received some very interesting questions and it was a highly valuable experience for us!



As always thank you for all support and interest, you rock :)

Cheers and see you in cyberspace!
No Rush Games